Chapter 16: First to Scale the Walls
Henry stood on the high ground of the siege camp and looked at Pyke.
It was unlike any castle he'd seen. The shore beneath it was all black reef and jagged cliff, and the fortress itself had grown out of the rock so completely over the centuries that it was genuinely difficult to say where the natural stone ended and the construction began. The towers, the walls, the great arching bridges — all of it the same grey-black as the reef, dark with moisture, green with moss, encrusted with bird droppings and the salt of a thousand storms. It smelled of all of those things at once.
The sea had been working on Pyke's foundations for longer than the ironborn had records. What had once been a single continuous headland jutting into the water had been shattered by centuries of wave and wind into three small islands and twelve standing pillars of stone, some barely wide enough for a man to stand on. The castle occupied all of it — the Great Keep on the largest island, the Kitchen Keep and the Bloody Keep on smaller ones facing each other across open water, towers and outbuildings on the sea stacks between them. Where the gaps were short, enclosed stone passages connected the structures. Where they were longer, rope bridges swayed in the wind, creaking in a way that suggested they were perpetually considering whether to hold.
The only approach to the main gate was across a stone bridge over the gap between the shore and the largest island. The bridge was blocked by a wall thick enough and high enough that every assault attempt so far had ended with ladders being pushed back off it and men falling into the water or onto the rocks below.
Henry watched another attempt fail from the high ground. The conscripts carried the ladders up to the wall under arrow fire, the ironborn pushed the ladders off, the men fell, the survivors walked back through the mud. The knights who'd sent them looked embarrassed and angry. Then it would happen again.
He thought about dragons, briefly, the way you think about things that would solve everything if only they existed. One breath from above and the pillars came down and Pyke fell into the sea. He let the thought go.
He thought about the rope bridges. He thought about the sea stacks and the height of the cliffs and the difficulty of climbing wet rock in armor. He let that go too.
He thought about the Nightwalker.
His eyes moved to the ironborn longship sitting in the camp's makeshift harbor. Specifically to the prow. Specifically to the iron ram worked into the shape of a goat's head, hollow-eyed, built for impact.
The thought arrived fully formed.
He stared at it for a long moment to make sure it was actually a plan and not just a thing he'd come up with because he was desperate. It held up under scrutiny. He turned from the wall and went to find his men.
"I need the mast down," he told Corlen. "And I need the hull inverted."
Corlen looked at the ship. Then at Henry. Then back at the ship. "You want to flip the longship."
"I want to use the hull as a roof," Henry said. "And the ram as a battering ram."
There was a pause while Corlen worked through the geometry of this.
"That," he said, slowly, "might actually work."
They took the mast down first, then organized the work of flipping the hull — thirty-three feet of ironborn shipbuilding, built to be light enough that a crew could carry it overland if they needed to move it between bodies of water. It went over with considerable effort and a great deal of noise.
Henry selected the strongest men from the thousand infantry Barristan had allocated him and added his own warband — a hundred and fifty men total. He had them get underneath the inverted hull, distributed along the keel, and practice lifting and moving together. They drilled it back and forth across the camp ground in the rain, chanting to keep the rhythm, the longship moving above them like a great wooden shell.
The rest of the camp watched in bafflement. Nobles and knights gathered on the high ground, arms folded, trying to work out what they were looking at. Henry didn't explain it. The approach would either work or it wouldn't, and a briefing wasn't going to change that.
The rain had settled into a steady drizzle when they moved out toward the gate.
Henry gave the cadence himself, voice carrying under the hull as they advanced across the open ground toward Pyke's gate. The inverted longship moved with them, the goat's head ram pointed forward.
The arrows came down almost immediately. The shafts hit the hull bottom and skipped off — the ironborn built their ships to survive ocean storms and the rams of enemy vessels. A few arrows found the gaps at the hull's edges and took men in the feet and legs. Those men went down, and the unsupported sections dipped and lurched, and the men immediately behind them stepped forward to fill the gaps without the cadence breaking. The men who'd fallen, outside the hull's protection now, took more arrows quickly.
Henry didn't stop the advance. He kept the rhythm.
The gap between the camp and the gate closed. The throwing spears started — heavier than arrows, capable of punching through wood at close range, but the hull held. Dents and gouges, nothing more. The ram at the prow pointed at the gate the whole way across.
He gave the order to run at fifty yards out.
The cadence broke into a collective shout and a hundred and fifty men sprinted the last stretch of open ground. The goat-headed iron ram hit the main gate of Pyke with a sound that Henry felt through the soles of his boots and up through his chest — a concussive, rolling boom that rang off the cliff faces and probably reached the King's tent on the far side of the siege camp.
The gate shook. Cracks appeared in the timber.
They pulled back and ran again.
Behind them, Henry could hear the noise of the camp changing — the particular roar that goes through an army when something shifts. He kept his eyes on the gate. Third impact. The cracks widened. The timber around the bar fittings began to split.
Fourth.
The gate opened.
Henry came through first, Red Rain in both hands.
The ironborn had formed up behind the gate — solid, armored men who'd been waiting for this and had their weapons ready. They hit Henry's line at the same moment Henry hit theirs.
Valyrian steel was not like other steel. The blade went through ironborn armor the way a good knife goes through leather — with the right angle, not much resistance required. Henry drove into the formation, shield bearers on both sides of him, Red Rain moving in the tight controlled strokes Barristan had drilled into him over the past weeks.
The ironborn who came at him directly went down. The ones who went at the men beside him went through Henry's blade on the way. He took a spear across the left pauldron that staggered him sideways, felt the impact but not the bite — good armor — and kept moving.
At some point he was aware of blood that wasn't his own on his breastplate and his gauntlets. He was aware of the ground becoming difficult underfoot. He kept his balance and kept his line and kept pushing.
The ironborn formation held for perhaps three minutes. Then it didn't.
The moment the line broke, it broke completely — the particular psychological collapse of men who believed the gate would hold, and then it didn't, and now the thing they'd been depending on was gone and the enemy was inside and nothing was where they'd expected it to be. Weapons went down. Men ran for whatever interior structure seemed most defensible, which meant they were running away from the gate rather than holding it.
More of the King's men poured through behind Henry — knights and men-at-arms, their boots loud on the stone slabs, their voices adding to the noise that was already enormous.
Maewyn took twenty men up the gatehouse stairs. Henry watched from the yard, breathing hard, as the Reyne banner — white field, Red Lion, painted on Blacktide Isle by Maester Winston's hand — went up on the highest point of the wall above the gate.
The rain came down on it steadily. The red pigment, not yet fully dry, ran in thin lines down the white cloth, bleeding and darkening as it soaked through.
Henry looked at it for a moment. Then he turned back to the gate and the work still ahead.
In the King's pavilion on the far side of the camp, Robert Baratheon came awake to the sound of the gate going down.
He was on his feet with his warhammer in his hand before he was fully conscious, which was the reflexive response of a man who had spent enough of his life being woken up by battles.
"Report!"
Lancel appeared in the tent entrance, soaked through, breathing in the uneven way of someone who'd been running. "Your Grace — the gate — Lord Reyne has—"
"Reyne?" Robert grabbed him by the collar. "All the rams are broken. How in seven hells did Reyne breach the gate?"
"He — he used a longship—"
"He rowed a boat through the gate?"
A white-cloaked figure appeared behind Lancel, stepped smoothly around him, and said, with the composure of a Kingsguard knight who has delivered unusual reports before, "Your Grace. Lord Reyne inverted a longship and used it as a mobile cover to advance to the gate. He used the iron ram on the prow as a battering ram. The gate is down."
Robert stared at the knight for a long moment.
Then he let go of Lancel, turned to the tent, and began shouting for his armor at a volume that had nothing to do with the distance to the nearest squire.
"Well done, Reyne," he said, to no one in particular, as the first piece of plate was buckled into place. His eyes were bright and his voice had the particular quality it got when battle was immediate and he was exactly where he wanted to be. "Well done. Now move aside, boy — there's an old squid in there that needs his skull caved in, and I intend to do it personally."
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